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Self-Typing Typewriter

Readymade for eBay

Talking Guitar

UVA

This Site

The Internet in 3D

About Me

Flock Size 5

Self-Typing Typewriter

Readymade for eBay

Talking Guitar

United Visual Artists

About This Site

Three-Dimensional Browsing

About Me

Self Typing Typewriter

I salvaged this 1930's American-made typewriter, featuring a German keyboard complete with umlauts and an "&Uumlmschalter" key, from a bin in Kensington. It was in a pretty poor condition, but with a good cleaning, oiling and a new ribbon it was fully functional - quite why anyone would want to throw away such a beautiful object is beyond me.

The '&Uumlmschalter' Key

The idea to make it type itself came about through an assignment for a module I was studying at Queen Mary called 'cruftfest' which involved finding an interesting but obsolete piece of equipment (or cruft) to turn into a digital media art piece. The keys are operated by forty four solenoids mounted under the typewriter on a laser-cut acrylic chassis, triggered by forty four mosfets and an Arduino Uno with a multiplexer shield attached to a custom-made PCB at the back. The carriage return and new line mechanism are operated by a small motor.

The Main PCB

Due to both budget and space constraints the solenoids had to be small, but run at their rated voltage they have nowhere near enough power to pull down the keys with sufficient force to print characters. To get around this, taking inspiration from a disposable camera flash, I built a circuit to charge up a capacitor bank to three hundred volts before discharging it through the solenoids, delivering a much more powerful tug on the keys.

The Solenoids

One of the limitations of this method is time - it takes about a second to charge the capacitor bank fully and a typing speed of one character per second seems a little slow. I am currently working on a solution to improve this speed.

Silent Cacophony

Silent Cacophony

Silent Cacophony was an event put on by John McKiernan of Platform 7 to commemorate remembrance day on 11.11.2013, and explore the effect of silence during war and conflict.
John approached me with the idea of using the typewriter in a collaboration with Nancy Esposito, an award-winning poet from Boston, who was writing a poem for the event. The idea was that she would type out her poem in a cafe in Boston, and the typewriter would type what she was typing here in London, at the fantastic St. Bride's institute on Fleet Street. The typewriter seemed to fit in well with the concept behind the event, not only due to the war-time connotations of its age and its German keyboard, but also because of the sound it makes, and the extraordinary periods of silence in between each stroke.

To connect Nancy and the typewriter I made a webpage which would save what Nancy typed into it onto a server, and a Processing app which would grab the text off the server as it arrived and send it via USB to the Arduino in the typewriter. I deliberately denied Nancy a cursor to see where she was typing and the ability to back-space, as you don't get either of these functions when typing on a typewriter, however this caused some confusion (see Nancy's blog post).

Going Soft by Nancy Esposito

The typewriter is available to use for events for a negotiable fee plus travel expenses. Email me for enquiries.

Readymade for eBay

Commissioned by the Barbican as part of their "Dancing Around Duchamp" season celebrating the work of the legendary artist and so called founder of modern art, Readymade for eBay was a digital art piece which paid homage to Duchamp's readymades while bringing their concept into the digital age of the 21st century.

Using a Duchampian-style algorithm seeded from "random" tweets, items were selected and purchased from eBay. They were then converted into 3D digital models and presented to the viewer through a website, allowing them to be rotated and examined in close detail by the viewer, whilst simultaneously presenting to them the actual sounds of the items being handled, recorded by artist Chris Jack.

Each item was then re-listed on eBay; if it was bought a new item would be selected to replace it, leading to a slow evolution of the piece over time.